“We have a situation,” says Nic Green at the start of The Situation Room, the first of a series of quarterly interventions organised by Fuel. The event, a mixture of performance and debate that took place at Somerset House in London on Thursday night, responded to our political landscape in the wake of the EU referendum result and Trump’s victory in the US. We certainly do have a situation – and the issue for theatre is how to react swiftly to world events when programmes are often nailed down months in advance and it takes time to create plays and performances.

The original “situation room” is located in the White House and was created after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. It was designed to be a place where crisis can be responded to according to current intelligence. The intelligence in Fuel’s Situation Room, on the theme of prejudice and perception, comes from artists and psychologists, writers and political thinkers. Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler and David Attenborough are all invoked in the slogans around the room and we are exhorted to “listen to people we disagree with”.

That’s good advice but the difficulty here is finding anybody in this achingly cool room, with its ironic bowls of cheesy Wotsits and its live illustrations and installations, who isn’t like-minded. Only the unscripted presence of a baby in the room keeps in view what is at stake: the future. Otherwise the evening plays to the usual suspects.

The performances are all of interest, among them Jay Johnson on acoustic guitar; Jess Thom, brilliant as ever doing part of her set about the prejudice she encounters as someone with Tourette’s – and most fascinatingly of all, Royal Holloway psychology researcher Manos Tsakiris, demonstrating how the brain processes information and how prejudice influences how we react to images, including one of a black man holding a mobile phone. The evening could do with more than these kind of interventions – it doesn’t challenge us enough.

Fuel’s instinct to want to respond more quickly to current events strikes me as a good one. Others have had a similar response after the Brexit vote. Annette Mees’s on-going Future Assembly project brings together teenagers and the over-60s to talk and devise a future together. The National Theatre’s listening project My Country, a work in progress, is inspired by a verbatim archive of conversations from across the UK. Scottee’s recent, brilliant Putting Words in Your Mouth, also inspired by a series of real-life conversations, laid bare racism in the context of the LGBT community.

But unlike The Situation Room, those projects are not just responses, they are also processes that consider the absence of some voices on our stages and explore how they might be heard. They are trying to tackle the fact that the arts can feel exclusive, rather than inclusive. In the end if the arts, and theatre in particular, wants to genuinely respond and enter into meaningful dialogues with those who feel excluded and disenfranchised, it needs to look outward not inward. Maybe getting out of the closed, protected environment of The Situation Room and into the real world would be a start.